Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
It is often useful for computer systems to determine, in real time, characteristics of software components and processes running on the computer system. The ability to determine such characteristics and gather information about them is generally called introspection. Network introspection, which is one type of system introspection, may be used for detection, protection, main management, compliance and security enforcement, etc.